Word: awe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While Gould the awe-struck and eager little boy serves as the inquisitive force in these essays, Gould the professor steps in to provide scholarly, though never didactic, explanations. In fact, Gould is so careful to avoid sounding technical that he seems more a well-read humanist with a strong interest in evolutionary theory than a scientist who is well-educated in other fields. He refers in almost every essay to such non-scientists as Odysseus, Rabelais, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Alexander Pope, and even Muhammad Ali as bridges to lesser-known scientists like Richard Goldschmidt, Baron Georges Cuvier, Paul Broca...
...Panda's Thumb" essay, for example, Gould tells us of his childhood adoration of pandas and how delighted he was "when the first fruits of our thaw with China went beyond ping pong to the shipment of two pandas to the Washington zoo. I went and watched with appropriate awe...
Eventually, the awe of science overcame the indifference toward it. As Lewis Thomas explains, "The more that is learned about nature, particularly the puzzling aspects?the queernesses being uncovered by the physicists, for example?the more engrossing it becomes." Adds Asimov: "We feel that if we do not understand science and the changes science makes possible, we may find ourselves overwhelmed...
...distance, too, but of a very different sort. In The Punisbed Land the author, who has lived in Jerusalem since 1955, seems to feel more strongly than most the spiritual implications of the ordinary, the deep religious possibilities of the merest object or encounter; these feelings seen to awe him. He is like, not a prophet, exactly, but a philosopher (in the older sense), passing (invisible?) through a "punished land," "too beautiful for its inhabitants"--but passing, at the same time, far too readily from the real world to the spirit world. Hardly getting his feet dusty he writes...
...Dionysus is somewhat muffled, despite Michael Cacoyannis' incisive direction and his crisply idiomatic translation. John Noah Hertzler's Pentheus is less a king than a kinglet, a petty tyro tyrant, and Christopher Rich's Dionysus is no god but a godlet, a prancing posturer devoid of awe, might and mystery...